Minimally invasive medical techniques are intended to reduce the amount of extraneous tissue that is damaged during diagnostic or surgical procedures, thereby reducing patient recovery time, discomfort, and deleterious side effects. While millions of “open” or traditional surgeries are performed each year in the United States; many of these surgeries can potentially be performed in a minimally invasive manner. One effect of minimally invasive surgery, for example, is reduced post-operative recovery time and related hospital stay. Because the average hospital stay for a standard surgery is typically significantly longer than the average stay for an analogous minimally invasive surgery, increased use of minimally invasive techniques could save millions of dollars in hospital costs each year. While many of the surgeries performed in the United States could potentially be performed in a minimally invasive manner, only a portion currently employ these techniques due to instrument limitations, method limitations, and the additional surgical training involved in mastering the techniques.
Minimally invasive tele-surgical systems are being developed to increase a surgeon's dexterity as well as to allow a surgeon to operate on a patient from a remote location. Telesurgery is a general term for surgical systems where the surgeon uses some form of remote control, e.g., a servomechanism, or the like, to manipulate surgical instrument movements rather than directly holding and moving the instruments by hand. In such a telesurgery system, the surgeon is provided with an image of the surgical site at the remote location. While viewing the surgical site on a suitable viewer or display, the surgeon performs the surgical procedures on the patient by manipulating master control input devices, which in turn control the motion of instruments. These input devices can move the working ends of the surgical instruments with sufficient dexterity to perform quite intricate surgical tasks.
Minimally invasive medical techniques, including tele-surgical systems can be further aided by improving visualization of the tissue where the procedure is to be carried out. One way to improve visualization of tissue is through the use of dyes. Thus, there is a need for novel, sterile, and non-toxic pharmaceutical compositions of near IR, closed chain, sulfo-cyanine dyes and methods for the visualization of tissue under illumination with near-infrared radiation. Surprisingly, the present invention meets these and other needs.